I acknowledge here that many significant editors would like to see transliterated Artist names as Disambiguations removed.
With many users and editors of MB being completely illiterate in scripts that Artists’ name appear in, inline search results not reliably displaying either sortname or language alias, and mouse-over not being available on Android devices - even momentarily, removing those Disambiguations would create real obstacles to many Artists being accessible on MB to a lot of people.
@reosarevok
I think the Style Guidelines need to be changed to protect existing transliterated Artist name Disambiguations. And encouragement of their creation.
An alternative seems to be inaccessibility of Artists and a bias towards more WP-like editing environment.
Another track would be short term protection and fast tracking of internationalisation.
(Anyone got the ticket number for Internationalization of Artist names handy?
Small screen and the ticket site don’t work well together.)
To a user who is illiterate in a script, most names in that script are indistinguishable from hundreds of other names in that script.
Hence the need to show Artist names in a familar script.
I think most MB community members would agree with above.
My previous post lists multiple scenarios in which non-Disambiguation methods of providing Artist names in script familar to the Latin script literate are currently failing to make Artists accessible to these users/editors. Latin script is currently the most widely recognised script globally AIUI.
My prefered solution is to have Artist names accessible to any user who is literate in one or more scripts.
This would seem to be real Internationalisation.
I’ll start another thread soon where we can search for ways to have inline search results reliably display a Latin script Artist name to all users / editors.
Currently having Artists reliably accessible to users and editors seems to need translit Artistname disambiguations to continue until device-agnostic solutions are working reliably.
This is true for most disambiguation comments btw, e.g. something like “Los Angeles rock group founded in 2012” (hypothetical example) is entirely made up of data we also track in machine-readable form.
I think that’s different. The disambiguation is subjectively edited to be what the editor thinks is a concise way to declare that this X is, or is not, the X you’re looking for [1].
For some groups, that may be the begin area, but for many groups, it won’t be.
For some groups, that may be their (super-)genre of music, but this isn’t exactly machine-readable.
For some groups, that may be the start date, but for many groups, it won’t be.
I don’t think anyone could reasonably argue that the most effective way to disambiguate X from X is to store its Latin script transliteration.
Footnotes:
[1] unless you have an unpopular guideline like Style / Specific types of releases / Soundtrack - MusicBrainz that misuses the disambiguation field, which most users neglect to implement in their editing, and which most users refuse to vote yes on when others do.
I would think that is not the case for people who cannot read the original script, otherwise people would not be entering such disambiguations?
While the current solution with transliterations as aliases makes searching work on a technical level, the actual search results only show the primary artist name in the original script, which doesn’t help the searcher if there are multiple similar-looking results and they cannot read the script in question. To fix this, the search results would have to show the alias that matched the search query.
